Latest news with #Commentary
News.com.au
18-05-2025
- Sport
- News.com.au
'Oh Umpire!'
AFL: Commentary was left stunned after two controversial calls in the late stages of the first half, in the Tigers home game against the Roos.
Daily Mirror
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Pulitzer Prize winner says 'I don't want to compare suffering' in poignant chat
Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and essayist, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his writing on Palestinian suffering during the Israeli conflict. In an awkward interview with MSNBC this is side-lined Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha refused to compare suffering as he was awkwardly questioned in an interview with MSNBC 's Weekend Primetime. Abu Toha appeared on the chat-show to talk with Ayman Mohyeldin, Antonia Hylton and Catherine Rampell about winning the highest accolade within journalism. However, Rampell's line of questioning has caused reaction across social media, not least from Abu Toha himself. Rampell congratulated Mosab on his award, but in her words, it had come "not without controversy." The anchor continues to ask about the case of British-Israeli hostage, Emily Damari. As reported by the BBC , Damari was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. Damari lost two fingers, and was then released in January 2025. The MSNBC anchor queries Abu Toha about a possible comment about whether Damari was a hostage at all. In response, he refutes this. He said: "First of all, I did not question her status as a hostage." Instead, he explains that the language used to describe those incarcerated differs depending on whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. He continues: "I have people in my family who were kidnapped from checkpoints, from schools, from shelters, and they are named prisoners. So my question is, why should Emily and other hostages be named hostages while my loved ones should be named prisoners?" He says: "I have never denied anyone's suffering. Everyone is suffering, Israelis and Palestinians. But why are our sufferings not acknowledged? Why are we called terrorists?" Abu Toha has written extensively about Palestinian suffering. On his personal pain, he said: "I was kept hostage for 53 hours. I was blind-folded, and hand-cuffed, and was beaten in my face. I asked Israeli soldiers to see a doctor, and they denied me any medical treatment. Am I less human than anyone else? So that was the question." He tells the three MSNBC anchors that 31 members of his family were killed in one airstrike. In response to Damari being held hostage for 15 months, he says "I don't want to compare suffering." But he continues on to highlight the continued plight of Palestinians, by saying: "A cousin of mine was killed in October 2023, and her body remained under the rubble for 558 days. And still, her husband and her child are still under the rubble to this day." When he is asked about his Pulitzer win, he explains that being awarded the prize is bigger than his own story. He says: "My win is not my win as Mosab, it is for the stories I shared with the whole world. And I promise you there are so many stories that I have that I haven't written." Mosab Abu Toha won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, for his series of essays in the New Yorker on the war in Palestine. The Pulitzer Prize committee in awarding Abu Toha the prestigious prize said that his work as contributor to the New Yorker consisted of "essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience." He won the prize for four articles, which include, ' My Family's Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza ' and The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian,' both of which highlight the suffering caused to the Palestinian people during the Israeli conflict.
New York Post
11-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Democrats' road not taken, Columbia's ‘academic freedom' hypocrites and other commentary
Liberal: Democrats' Road Not Taken 'Democrats currently are at a fork in the road to their political future and how that future turns out depends on which path they choose,' muses The Liberal Patriot's Ruy Teixeira. They can take either 'the party of restoration' path or the less traveled 'party of change' one. Polling shows 'voters want change — big change'; the 'party's brand is in wretched shape and views of Democratic governance are negative.' Advertisement Dems 'will have to work really hard to convince voters, especially working-class voters, that they embody change.' Democrats 'don't realize that they are at a fork in the road,' yet if they keep on the nothing-but-anti-Trump path it 'will make them the party of restoration in a change era — and ensure that the political breakthrough they are seeking will continue to elude them.' Campus watch: Columbia's 'Academic Freedom' Hypocrites Critics of President Trump's 'enforcement of civil-rights laws' at universities gripe that a crackdown on pro-Hamas protesters will destroy academic freedom, notes Commentary's Seth Mandel. Advertisement Yet it's the 'anti-Zionists' who've been 'erasing academic freedom,' and punishing them 'will help restore it.' The 'tentifada mobs' made that point clearly 'when they stormed Butler Library and forced nearly a thousand students to stop studying' for finals. Even groups that usually defend the goons said protesters went too far. Yet if academic-freedom groups had led the fight 'to restore the academic freedom of the Jewish students under siege' from 'campus Hamasniks,' then perhaps now 'they wouldn't be fighting to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Harvard and Columbia and the rest.' Advertisement From the left: How US Higher-Ed Turned Useless As professors gripe about the 'climate of fear' stemming from Gov. Ron DeSantis' and President Trump's DEI crackdowns, Racket News' Matt Taibbi observes it's just 'the latest in a long chain of official actions and reactions, during which American higher education became increasingly a) expensive and b) useless.' Remember: Obama-era 'federal pressures' on campus sexual-harassment led to a 2022 poll showing that 'huge pluralities of Americans held their tongues for fear of 'retaliation and harsh criticism.'' DeSantis' anti-DEI rules 'go too far,' trading 'one brand of groupthink for another': Yes, 'universities have become madhouses and ignorance-factories whose purpose is not to teach but produce sinecures for ed-sector dingbats,' but 'I don't want federal thought police of any stripe sitting atop them.' From the right: Bernie's Private-Jet Hypocrisy Advertisement Sen. Bernie Sanders won ridicule with news 'that he spent $221,723 in campaign money on private jets for his 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour,' scoffs the Washington Examiner's Byron York. Bernie's excuse? 'You run a campaign and you do three or four or five rallies in a week . . . That's the only way you can get around.' Yet, notes York, 'Sanders has long had a taste for private jets'; indeed, his 'requests for private jets were so frequent that they at first irritated and then angered Clinton staffers' during the 2016 campaign. Bernie's 'message is basically that billionaires are destroying American democracy,' but he has something in common with them: They also 'defend their use of private planes by saying they are just so busy' they can't fly commercial like the little people. Law prof: Partisan Persecution of Lawyers Isn't New 'I opposed the executive orders of President Trump targeting law firms,' writes Jonathan Turley at The Hill, but 'many of those objecting today to the targeting of Democratic firms and lawyers were the very same people who targeted conservative lawyers for years.' Indeed, 'I personally know lawyers who were told to drop Republican cases or else find new employment — including partners who had to leave their longstanding firms.' Many 'deans and law professors protesting Trump's orders' had 'previously purged their schools of Republicans and conservatives.' Advertisement At least 'there could be a modicum of recognition of the years of systematically purging conservative lawyers and law professors by some of these very critics.' — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
New York Post
07-05-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Aid groups want to prolong war, dodging the tariff apocalypse and other commentary
Gaza watch: Aid Groups Want To Prolong War Humanitarian groups are refusing to 'have anything to do' with Israel's new 'plan to renew food aid to Gazans,' fumes Commentary's Seth Mandel. The United Nations whines that the plan 'is 'designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic.' ' Translation: It lets Israel 'feed the Palestinian population without sustaining Hamas' — which executes non-Hamas Palestinians who try to access aid storage facilities. Fact is, funding from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which goes to schools that 'serve as Hamas battle stations' and promote a 'medieval antisemitism' curriculum, is meant to prolong the conflict 'until Israel is destroyed and the Jews can be wiped out.' Aid groups' 'refusal to feed Gazans' unless 'they and Israel acquiesce' to Hamas rule 'serves the same purpose.' Conservative: Dodging the Tariff Apocalypse Advertisement 'The doom that was supposed to follow President Trump's tariff revolution,' notes The Wall Street Journal's Gerard Baker, 'has so far stubbornly failed to materialize,' Yes, it's ' much too soon to celebrate,' since 'actual tariffs imposed so far' are 'still relatively modest.' And 'anecdotal, real-time and small-set data from ports, transportation companies and retailers are unsettling — they speak of the hit to come from tariffs if they aren't negotiated down or away, especially the 145% duty on imports from China.' 'But there are opportunities too: more-secure supply chains' and 'a chance to nurture high-end domestic manufacturing and reduce our financial dependency on the rest of the world.' Trump's tariff plan is 'yielding not the apocalypse that was forecast, but a set of thorny economic challenges all the same.' Culture critic: Everyone's Cheating in College 'In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments,' reports New York magazine's James D. Walsh. Collegians everywhere now 'are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education,' as they can't 'resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences.' Professors fear AI's 'short-circuiting' the learning process, yet 'the ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT.' Heck, the 'speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core.' Advertisement From the right: Biden's Decline Was No Secret 'There is an inside story' and 'an outside story of Biden's decline,' argues the Washington Examiner's Byron York after new insider revelations about efforts to cover up the then- president's 'senescence.' Both the White House and its media allies denied 'that the president had a serious problem' though it was evident to the public. 'Another way to put it would be to say that the inside story was the effort to deny the outside story existed.' Clearly, White House aides 'went beyond simple denial' while supporters in the media 'attacked those who said Biden had a problem.' Only now are Americans 'learning more about the lengths to which the Biden team and its many allies in politics and media went to conceal the truth.' Ed desk: Crimson vs. Orange Advertisement 'The battle is on between Harvard, which did not want battle, and the Trump Administration that sought it,' warns Harvey C. Mansfield at The Harvard Crimson. 'A major concern among the Trump Administration is Harvard's lack of viewpoint diversity'; 'Harvard's one-sided fondness for the left' provoked the fight. 'Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society; it's worth the money!' Yet 'to depend on the courts to defend its independence is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege.' And 'this gratuitous partisan attitude' will not 'preserve Harvard's independence' but endanger it. 'There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to share our company.' 'A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have' served the school far better.' — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
Epoch Times
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
China's Cybersecurity ‘Pearl Harbor' Against America: ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once'
Originally published by Commentary China's multidimensional war against U.S. interests is already underway and well-documented. One underappreciated dimension of its attack on American primacy, however, is the arena of cybersecurity. For decades, Communist China's spies, hackers and businessmen have feasted on the In the last two years, however, the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) cyber-attacks against America have These changes in the CCP's cyber offensive on America consist of two basic capabilities. Related Stories 4/22/2025 4/18/2025 The newer capability is China's comprehensive data-collection operation, given the title of 'Salt Typhoon' by Microsoft, and known by other names, such as ' China is also simultaneously The second revolutionary advance in China's offensive cyber-warfare capabilities that target U.S. interests is more deadly. It threatens a Pearl Harbor-magnitude attack on America. ' Then U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz, shortly before he was appointed National Security Advisor, stated in an '[W]e have been, over the years, trying to play better and better defense when it comes to cyber. We need to start going on offense and start imposing, I think, higher costs and consequences to private actors and nation state actors that continue to steal our data, that continue to spy on us, and that even worse, with the Volt Typhoon penetration, that are literally putting cyber time bombs on our infrastructure, our water systems, our grids, even our ports.' China could The gravity of this weaponization of cyberspace at the strategic level has been Volt Typhoon is devised to create chaos in the United States. Jen Easterly, former head of the US Cybesecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, If China is successful in placing undiscovered and undefused malware that is capable of disabling critical infrastructure in the United States, the result would most likely be the complete loss of confidence in America's ability to protect 'Free Asia' or anyone else, and enabling China to be closer to achieving its goal of ruling in the Indo-Pacific region, which it appears to see as the The Trump Administration's plan of action would do well to include massive arms deliveries to Taiwan and encouraging the island democracy to move to a war footing. President Donald Trump has already sent Trump might also convene a cabinet meeting to assure that all aspects of American public and private capabilities should be mobilized to build resiliency in critical national infrastructure, while simultaneously examining U.S. cyberspace vulnerabilities. The United States also might also go on the offense and target China's critical national infrastructure, perhaps starting with the Cyberspace Administration of China? Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
